![]() The initial coverage reminds me a bit of this: You might also read the official MadCap press release.) (If you’re looking for a discussion of all the new features, I suggest you wander over to Paul Pehrson’s review. This review looks at the DITA features in the new product. However, with the release of Flare 5, MadCap has added support for DITA. As a result, our interest in help authoring tools such as Flare and RoboHelp has been muted. These days, most of our work uses XML and/or DITA as foundational technologies. However, if the PDF process in Flare works as smoothly as the one for WebHelp, Flare could provide a compelling alternative to modifying the XSL-FO templates that come with the Open Toolkit or adopting one of the commercial FO solutions for rendering PDF output.įlare 5 DITA feature review (Part 1: Overview and map files) We didn’t evaluate how Flare handles DITA-to-PDF conversion. Our only quibble was with the TOC entries in the WebHelp (as mentioned in Part 1), and we’ve heard that MadCap will likely be addressing that issue in the future. Flare handled DITA constructs (such as conrefs and relationship tables) without any problems in our testing. Without a lot of effort, we were able to create WebHelp from imported DITA content. If you’re looking for a path to browser-based help for your DITA content, you should consider the new version of Flare. As expected, the output included the user-level paragraph and excluded the admin-level one. I set Audience.admin to Exclude and er to Include, and then I created WebHelp. When I looked in the Project Organizer at the conditions for the WebHelp target, conditions based on my audience values were listed: I imported a map file with a topic that used the audience attribute: one paragraph had that attribute set to user, and another had the attribute set to admin. When you import DITA content that contains attribute values, Flare creates condition tags based on those values. ![]() If you need to publish specialized DITA content through Flare, you might consider generalizing back to standard DITA first. According to MadCap, it worked for some people in testing, but not for others. Specialized content is not officially supported at this point. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s worth noting. ![]() In other words, Flare separates out the content being reused into a snippet and then references the snippet. In Flare, we end up with three instances - the snippet and two references to the snippet. Thus, we have two instances of the content in the DITA files - the original content and the content reference. It’s worth noting that the referencing, while equivalent, is not the same. I created a simple conref for a note and then imported the map file with one DITA file that contains the actual note and a second file that references the note via a conref.įlare happily imported the information and turned the conref into a Flare snippet. The sentence-style capitalization and red text for “Related concepts” in the following screen shot reflect my modifications:ĭITA conrefs let you reuse chunks of content. I then tinkered with the project’s stylesheet and its language skin for English to change the default appearance and text of the heading for related concepts. The output included the links to the related topics. I imported a simple map file with a relationship table into Flare and created WebHelp. Based on the relationships you specify in the table, related topic links are generated in your output. You can modify the stylesheet for the Flare project to change that text and styling.ĭITA relationship tables let you avoid the drudgery of manually inserting (and managing!) related topic links. On the link to the topic, Flare applied a default cross-reference format that included the word “See” and the quotation marks around the topic’s name. Here’s a link with external scope:Īll three came across in the WebHelp I generated from Flare: And here’s a link to the other task topic: And here’s a reference to the third step. Reference to another step in the same topic:.I imported DITA content that contained three xref elements (I shortened the IDs below for readability): Part 1 provides an overview and discusses localization and map files. This post is Part 2 of our Flare 5 DITA feature review.
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